Postpaid cellular phone (cell phone) and other types of wireless services typically allow the user of a cell phone or other product to spend unlimited amounts of money for services. In other words, there is nothing to stop the user from running up a huge bill. Many parents and employers have experienced this issue with children and employees, prompting parents and employers to take away phones or devices from children/employees or to otherwise restrict access to the phones or devices, collectively referred to as cellular phones, cell phones, smart phones and/or mobile devices herein. Smartphones and other digital devices also allow users to access a wide variety of content and applications, some of which may be inappropriate for the user (e.g., pornographic, malware, gambling, not business related, etc.) or the environment (e.g., during school, at the office, etc.).
One partial solution to the problems associated with postpaid cellular phone abuse is the prepaid cellular phone or device. Prepaid phone services limit spending because the user of the phone can only use what has been paid (or allocated) for in advance. Many users, however, are not responsible or mature enough to adequately track and maintain their prepaid phone service accounts, and many parents/employers have too many other obligations to keep close track of their children's/employee's detailed device usage so as to make sure service accounts are adequately and appropriately funded all of the time. The net result can be disastrous. For example, if a child uses up all of the units in their prepaid account, and their phone service provider shuts down access to its services, the child will not be able to call a parent in the event of an emergency, or arrange to be picked up after school or a sporting event, etc.
Thus, a prepaid phone service does not solve the problem of ensuring availability of key services even if the prepaid account has run out of money. In addition to insuring the safety of their children, many parents, employers and others would like to be able to exercise administrative control over the services and activities that a child, employee, etc., is allowed to pay for out of their prepaid account, but prepaid and postpaid accounts have heretofore not been structured to provide such administrative control or feature management. Feature management can encompass many activities, such as preventing one or more features or services from being used entirely, limiting how much a particular feature or service can be used in a given time period, limiting the other party or parties with whom the feature may be used, limiting where a feature or features may be used or content consumed, limiting when a given feature or service can be used (i.e. time of day, days in month, etc.), or some combination of these.
Some prior attempts by prepaid and postpaid service providers to address these problems have only resulted in partial solutions. Some service providers have provided for rollover usage minutes, which are minutes that were not used as part of a user's service plan and are allowed to roll over to the same user for use in the next month. In some cases, this might prevent a user from running out of minutes in the next month, but it does not guarantee that the user will not use up all of their monthly minutes, plus the rollover minutes, and be denied access to key services anyway. Other service providers have provided an automated refill service, which automatically bills some amount to a credit card to recharge the user's prepaid account in the event the balance in the user's account gets too low. However, a prepaid phone service with an automated refill service is the equivalent of a postpaid phone service and would therefore have the same problem with potential abuse as a postpaid service. In other words, there is no spending limit on the phone or device service.
Postpaid services have also attempted to address these problems by offering users unlimited usage packages that limit a user's exposure to running up charges. However, for parents and employers interested in preventing a user from sending 300, or even more, text messages per day with their phone, or running up a huge bill for services that are not included in the “unlimited usage package,” such as downloaded games or ringtones, surfing the Internet, etc., unlimited usage offerings are not a complete solution. Another partial solution is to provide the administrator (e.g., parent, employer) with an alert when a user has reached some limit for a service. For example, a parent could be alerted when a child has spent more than $10 on text messages within a certain period of time. An alert, however, does not actually limit usage of the service, it just warns the parent/employer that the limit has been reached, at which point the parent/employer has to intervene to prevent further abuse, such as by taking the phone away from the user, which is one of the problems with postpaid services in the first place.
Some prepaid phones may have the ability to store electronic units, such as through use of a credit card charge or electronic transfer from a bank account. Some corporate customers with multiple users under the same service provider may be able to have a single account for their business, with subaccounts assigned to certain phones and charged to the particular departments within the corporation to which the employees using those phones correspond. Some service providers may also be able to provide affinity accounts, which include special rates and promotions for groups of people belonging to a similar business, club, etc. In each case, however, these accounts operate separately from one another in that all of the charges for a particular phone are charged to a particular account, rather than some charges being billed to one account while other charges are billed to another account. The same is true with respect to discounts and promotions, i.e., a discount or promotion is either applied to an existing account or it is not.